This invention relates to an equipment mount for isolating large equipment or systems of equipment from shock loads and small amplitude acoustic vibrations.
To minimize the transmission of small amplitude vibrations into the surrounding water, shipboard equipment and/or equipment platforms are currently mounted on resilient mounts. A typical large capacity (5,000 or 10,000 pounds) mount comprises three separate elements: a compression element, a shear element, and a shock snubber. The compression element provides vibration isolation in the axial direction while the shear element provides isolation in the transverse directions. The compression and shear elements must be used together since neither can individually provide adequate isolation in all directions.
The standard resilient mount stiffness must be sufficiently low (typically 5 Hertz) to ensure adequate attenuation of input excitations. A mount with a sufficiently low stiffness to handle such excitations, however, is not stiff enough to compensate for shock loads, that is, loads typically experienced in battle conditions. Thus, equipment mounted with the standard resilient mount would experience large deflections when subjected to shock load. To address this problem, shock snubbers are typically installed in conjunction with the compression and shear elements. Shock snubbers physically limit the displacement excursion of the equipment under shock. Snubbers are not shock isolators and do not provide any shock attenuation. Thus, equipment intended to be mounted on the prior art resilient equipment mount must therefore be designed to withstand large shock accelerations.